For over two decades, The Innocence Mission has been quietly floating in and out of public consciousness. The Lancaster-based band has released albums on both major labels and indies, toured the world alongside likeminded songbirds Natalie Merchant and Emmylou Harris and contributed music to movie soundtracks. But, due mostly to their reclusive nature, The Innocence Mission remain at least in some respects our own little secret.
This month, the band returns with We Walked in Song, another lesson in fragile simplicity (out March 20). We managed to get our hands on a copy and let our music reviewer, Dugan Nash, give us the breakdown. –ed.

Some career artists succeed at holding fans in their sway by relentless reinvention. Seemingly to keep up with the modern cultural obsession with changing images a mile a minute, artists like Radiohead rely on surprising and wowing listeners by breaking, bending and rewriting rules on each recorded outing.
The Innocence Mission exercise the more old-fashioned long-view method for success, forgoing the risk of eventual re-invention into oblivion. Essentially, they do one thing very well, and they continue to do that one thing better and better, if only by baby steps. The Innocence Mission perform a unique function in many people’s lives and music catalogues. They are the winter-day soundtrack, the lump-in-the-throat reminder about how much friends and loved ones mean to us in their everyday comings and goings.
Over their 20-plus years of writing music, Karen Peris, Don Peris and Mike Bitts have carefully and maybe deliberately polished their wheel, instead of reinventing it. They return once again on We Walked in Song to what they do very well, and they do it as sweetly and with as much hesitant grace as ever. Karen Peris’ voice is nearly a whisper much of the time as she tip toes around delicate arrangements and hushed tones. Her delivery and voice are as introverted and restrained as the extremely specific and personal vignettes. These stories somehow become universal and relatable despite the fact that they are about people and places that most listeners don’t know. We don’t need to know who the characters are to participate in the deep sighs of contentment, the grateful eye cast skyward or the quiet tears of loss.
There are moments that sound fresh and slightly unexpected on We Walked in Song; they are few but welcome. “Into Brooklyn, Early In The Morning” opens up into a sleepy Mamas and the Papas harmony arrangement with sparse drums. Occasionally, there is something that sounds like ukulele reminding me a bit of the sweet, sad opening strums in Nico’s “These Days” (which many people would recognize from its use in TV commercials). New added touches may be few, but The Innocence Mission have so mastered the art of painting life’s most subtle moments so eloquently and with such grace in a consistent way that We Walked in Song isn’t lacking without them.
Reinvention might be evidence of maturity in some cases, but it is not synonymous with growth. When you reengineer the wheel so many times that you end up presenting the world with the first automobile to drive around on postmodern octagons, nothing of real substance is gained. The Innocence Mission seem to understand fully the value and utility of the music that they create. With each record, they refine this thing that has always drawn people to them in gradual, sometimes nearly imperceptible increments. The songs on We Walked in Song simply take a few more small steps forward in their usefulness to their listeners.